Success

Lift, on this earth may be likened to a great kaleidoscope before which the scenes and facts and material substances are ever shifting and changing, and all any man can do is to take these facts and substances and re-arrange them in new combinations. The process through which this is done is called imagination. We have stated that the imagination is both interpretative and creative in its nature. It can receive impressions or ideas and out of these it can form new combinations.

As our first illustration of the power of imagination in modern business achievement, we will take the case of Clarence Saunders, who organized the Piggly-Wiggly system of self-help grocery stores. Saunders was a grocery clerk in a small southern retail store.

One day he was standing in a line, with a tin tray in his hands, waiting his turn to secure food in a cafeteria. He had never earned more than $20.00 a week before that time, and no one had ever noticed anything about him that indicated unusual ability, but something took place in his mind, as he stood in that line of waiting people, that put his imagination to work.

With the aid of his imagination he lifted that "self-help" idea out of the cafeteria in which he found it (not creating anything new, merely shifting an old idea into a new use) and set it down in a grocery store.

In an instant the Piggly-Wiggly chain-store grocery plan had been created and Clarence Saunders the twenty-dollar-a-week grocery clerk rapidly became the million-dollar chain-store groceryman of America. Where, in that transaction, do you see the slightest indication of a performance that you could not duplicate?

IT will make a big difference to you whether you are a person with a message or a person with a grievance. Analyze this transaction and measure it by the previous lessons of this course and you will see that Clarence Saunders created a very definite purpose. He supported this purpose with sufficient self-confidence to cause him to take the initiative to transform it into reality.